


A Few Lines Of Stolen Code

by Pixiemage



Category: Wreck-It Ralph (Movies)
Genre: But not for the reasons one would think, Consequences, Dad!King Candy, Daughter!Vanellope, Other, Payback, Regret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-21
Updated: 2019-12-21
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:40:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21889069
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Pixiemage/pseuds/Pixiemage
Summary: [Based on the concept that King Candy was once a canon character prior to Turbo’s takeover of Sugar Rush.]Turbo could have killed Vanellope at any point in time. He could have. He could have destroyed her coding line by line until nothing was left....but he didn’t. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. Why? What had changed? Or rather...what was making him change?
Comments: 2
Kudos: 38





	A Few Lines Of Stolen Code

A lone figure paced the throne room, his pompom-tipped royal slippers padding softly against the sugar-glazed tiles. His frilly and colorful appearance stood as a stark contrast to the dark irritation brewing beneath his regal clothing and glittering crown.

Turbo scowled and scratched at a spot along his frilly collar. An itch had settled just below the surface, his skin crawling and his very code making him feel jittery. Off. Irritated.  _ Itchy _ . With an annoyed and grumbled huff, he gave up pacing on his next about-turn and dropped onto his (not really his) throne in an undignified and slouched heap.

What was this? What was happening to him?

Turbo had known the risks he was taking by altering his own coding. He would rather leave it as it was, but after what had happened in Roadblasters - well. It was necessary to avoid another catastrophe like that. He hadn’t factored in the difference in graphic cards and software. Shoving older coding like his into a newer game like that one had been was bound to create some (then unexpected) bugs. No, he needed to adapt his coding for everything to work properly. But the simpler he kept his changes, the less risk there would be for himself. That’s why he had resorted to mapping another character’s texture overtop of his own as opposed to editing his own sprite directly. Another character. The king. King Candy. The  _ real _ King Candy. When Turbo had begun his little coup d’etat, sneaking into Sugar Rush had been a piece of pixelated cake. He had made it into the castle without too much trouble once he had realized it housed the game’s Code Room, and the helpful hints he had received from other underground coding fanatics back in the Arcade - well. Those had certainly helped in his little project.

Konami Code indeed.

Creating a brand new physical code block for himself was the most difficult part. It had taken weeks of careful replication of his own digital DNA to build it from the ground up, but once he had wired himself fully into Sugar Rush - the sensation of feeling  _ whole _ for the first time in years was one he couldn’t put into words. Turbo had taken a breath then, taken a break, and let himself revel in the feeling of being fueled by the electricity of the Arcade. He had almost forgotten what it felt like, being directly connected to the power strip like this. Raw energy buzzed between his pixels and what little damage his health had taken while being unplugged was replenished in full.

Not to drop his own catchphrase, but... _ Turbo-tastic. _

Locking up the citizen’s memories, the racer’s memories...kidnapping the King himself. All little pieces of his very big plan. Turbo couldn’t have anyone looking for “his royal highness” before things were fully put into motion. Keeping King Candy in the code room might have been a risk, but it was one he was willing to take if it kept the frilly puff ball out of sight and out of mind of the other citizens of the game. Thankfully, Sugar Rush was still a very very recent addition to the arcade...so nobody else from  _ outside _ this world would come looking for some missing wayward royalty.

In the present, in his not-really-his throne, Turbo dragged both hands down his face and rubbed at his aching eyes, resisting the urge to scratch at the itch that still refused to let up.

The King. That was where all of this was spawning from, it had to be…whatever ‘ _ this _ ’ was.

In his attempt to blend into Sugar Rush and take control, Turbo had opted to take on the role of King Candy himself so as to make his own job easier. Instead of creating a new character texture and backstory from scratch he could just...modify something that already existed. So once the citizen’s memories (and the King) had been locked away, Turbo had stripped necessary strings of code from King Candy’s code block and carefully threaded them into his own, stealing what he needed and altering what didn’t quite work. It was long and tedious work but for what he was planning to do with it? Worth it. The king already had a similarly shaped model to Turbo’s, so modifying the other’s visual texture to work for himself wasn’t too difficult. Speech patterns and memories, mannerisms and catch phrases – all little memory files that Turbo could duplicate and add to his own code block without damaging or changing himself.

He tried to ignore how it affected the King who always floated, tied up, just out of the corner of Turbo’s line of sight. With each line of coding Turbo pulled apart, the sugary monarch was looking less and less rosy-cheeked and more and more ill. He had grown mostly quiet after the first few days, clearly not having the energy to put up a fight any longer. Every so often the king’s gaze would linger for long periods of time on one of the code blocks that Turbo hadn’t bothered to analyze. One of the racers, their long and candy-themed name not quite legible from this distance. It didn’t matter. It wasn’t important.

Except it was. It was, and Turbo should have factored that in, should have done a little more research before diving head-first into coding.

Vanellope Von Schweetz. It wasn’t until after most of King Candy’s programmed memories had slotted into place alongside Turbo’s that he even knew  _ the king wasn’t the only member of the royal family. _

He had a daughter.

A  _ daughter. _

A daughter who, according to the game files, could undo all of Turbo’s hard work if she so much as finished one more race. It was from sheer luck alone that Vanellope hadn’t been in a race the past few days.

Or was it?

Vanellope’s memories, while connected to the other racers, would have their own separate files as well. Wouldn’t they? As a significant character in Sugar Rush, she wouldn’t just be lumped in with the rest of the characters. She may still have memories of her missing father, may be searching for him instead of participating in races. And if even one person began to believe her–

Turbo had to delete her. He had to remove her. Get rid of her, just like he was going to do with dear old dad the moment he didn’t need the king’s coding anymore. Yes, that was exactly what he would do. He would delete her right then and there and be done with it–

A frustrated groan filtered through the empty throne room.

...except Turbo hadn’t been able to do it. He had pulled her plugs, had detached her code block from the rest of the game, and he had been dead set on pulling her coding apart line by tiny line...but as he tapped on her little glitching block to open the files...his hands had started to shake. A feeling of chilled dread had washed over him and he had pulled back, instead opting to shove the code block into the depths of the Code Room and out of his line of sight.

She would be a glitch now, at the very least. He could - he could make her an outcast. Shun her. Cut her off. Never let her race again. Yes, that - that would do. It would work just as well as deleting her, and his hands wouldn’t be dirtied by what amounted to murder. That’s all this was. He simply couldn’t stand the thought of being a murderer. That had to be it.

But here, now, in the throne room, with that little itch of...worry, it was  _ worry _ ...at the back of his mind, Turbo knew full well that wasn’t the case. Sure, he had told himself that in the moment, but a day later and he had been shredding what was left of King Candy’s coding, watching his highness disintegrate into pained and flickering pixels before his very eyes.

No, he was very capable of killing somebody.

_ So why not Vanellope? _

Even as he asked himself the question, he found himself already aware of the answer, and a bitter scowl crossed his usually cheerful features.

_ ‘Because you care about her.’ _

Turbo snarled and shoved himself out of his chair, storming from the throne room and fleeing from the thought as he made a beeline for his (not really his) bedroom.

No. No, forget that.  _ Screw _ that. He couldn’t care about Vanellope. She was a thorn in his side, a wrench in his plans and a tiny little  _ pest _ that he should have exterminated long ago. The only reason she was still alive was because–

_ ‘Because the thought of her getting hurt is painful.’ _

Turbo almost tripped over his pompom-clad feet as the realization struck him. That thought hadn’t been entirely his own. Who…?

_ ‘Now you’re beginning to see it, aren’t you?’ _

He stood frozen in the middle of one of many vast corridors in the castle, a sugar-glass window casting odd colors across the floor beneath his feet. Turbo swallowed thickly and glanced sideways at his (not really his) reflection. The face that stared back at him wasn’t really his own, he knew. It was the King’s eyes that watched him...and though Turbo himself didn’t smile, he could have sworn his reflection did, if only for a moment.

The king.

The king’s coding.

The king’s  _ memories _ .

The king’s  _ daughter _ .

Turbo should have known, should have realized - in tying King Candy’s memories so closely to his own, making them a part of his permanent coding, he had gained an unintentional side effect.  _ Turbo _ may hold nothing but resentment toward Vanellope Von Schweetz. But the king? The man whose memories sat firmly in Turbo’s head? Oh, he cared for Vanellope very, very much. Why wouldn’t he? The girl was his  _ daughter _ . The princess. And King Candy’s coding had been a part of Turbo’s for long enough now that the memories of who he  _ was _ and who he was  _ pretending to be _ were getting more and more difficult to distinguish.

Turbo’s reflection smiled. It was a sad smile, but one that held a soft and warm victory.

_ ‘You may have taken my throne, taken my game,’ _ the man in his mind spoke up gently.  _ ‘But I will never allow you to harm my daughter. Have fun with your reign, “your highness”.’ _

….shit.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve always loved the concept of King Candy being a real character at one point in time before Turbo showed up. Vanellope is a princess, not a queen, and at the end of the first WIR film it always felt like she was setting up a new reign of rule in her game. Like...it was new to her too. Plus it makes it so much more interesting if the story goes this way... ;)


End file.
